Thursday, 7 November 2013

Thom has been learning about space at preschool lately and wanted to try and make some more space games for home. So we decided to make some space play dough based on the really easy glitter play dough we made last year. I've included the recipe here again for you. The only changes I've made this time was to add 3 tablespoons of glitter and

What you need:

1/2 cup of salt (the basic supermarket kind)

1 cup plain white flour

2 tablespoons cream of tartar (find this in the cooking aisle)

1 cup of water

1 tablespoon oil (sunflower or vegetable is fine)

black food colouring

fine glitter

Air-tight containers for storage

Steps:1. Mix all dry ingredients together in a pot.2. Add all wet ingredients to the dry ingredients including food colour to your desired colour (1-2 drops is usually plenty).3. Cook on a medium heat on the stove for 3-5 mins, stirring constantly. Mixture might look a bit lumpy for a while and then suddenly come together to a thick (almost) play dough consistency.4. Remove the pot from the stove and add your glitter (use however much you like). I used 3 tablespoons for a single batch of play dough. Mix well.

5. Once glitter is combined you can scrape the play dough into a container. The container needs to be air-tight.

Thursday, 3 October 2013

I love the
simple things you can make. Em and I were only saying last week we sometimes
think they are the best ideas we have!

This week I
made the easiest little framed gift you could think of. Perfect for a little baby's
room.

I found a font
I liked called Monaco, from my Microsoft Word.

Then I wrote out 'ABC' in the font and
then increased the screen size to 500% and traced straight off the screen onto some
baking paper.

Next I cut out
the paper shapes, and used them to trace around onto the back of the fabric.
Just remember you need to trace them in the mirror image if you are tracing on
the back of the fabric.

Finally I cut
them out and glued them to a piece of card and framed it.

It was really
so simple – it took me half and hour while I watched tv!!

Like most of
the things Em and I make there are so many variations you could make with this
idea. Large bold coloured letters, lower-case letters, or giant letters in
individual frames… they would all look amazing!

Monday, 24 September 2012

We are going to a birthday party this morning for a little boy who’s turning 4. I wanted to give him something that was personalised, yet didn’t take me too much time to make!

So I decided to make him a little tin-can pencil holder (I purchased the pencils of course!) and a little train painting on canvas to give him inspirations for his future scribbling! The baked bean tin that I used for the pencil holder looks really nice and is VERY simple to do. Read here to see how to easily make the pencil holder with a bit of spray glue and material.

And as we all know, children’s artwork is one of the happiest and loveliest thing in the world! Therefore I “stole” one of my daughter’s drawings and used that for the train.

Firstly, I enlarged the drawing on my laser printer/photocopier.

The drawing itself looked like this (below, already enlarged), and was originally quite small.

It is very cutely named “Mummy driving a train”. !! I then traced the part of it that I wanted to use!(i.e. I took “Mummy” off the drawing!) Sorry about the orientation of these photos, it's blogger's fault!

I then turned the tracing paper over and traced over the lines again. This was so that the train was facing the way I wanted it to on the canvas.

Then I simply placed it on the canvas, traced again, and then painted it.

I used Dulux Eagle Feather for the brown, and Haymes Red Geranium for the red. I did paint some white in the middle using a little leftover tin of Dulux Natural White.

There are absolutely ENDLESS options for this project. An arrangement of lovely little (or big!) painted drawings would just look SO good in any room… and you can just do them in the colours that you want to have in the room! I think I'm also going to do something similar on a t-shirt soon for my little boy.

Welcome!

We are two friends, Caity and Emma, and we love everything handmade and creative. Our blog is all about making beautiful things for our homes and gifts for our friends and families. We also want to share our ideas with you! Each of our posts give you step-by-step instructions on how to complete our projects.... so that you can try them yourself at home if you'd like to. ENJOY!

More about caity and emma

contact us

thomhaushandmade@yahoo.com.au

why the thom haus name?

Lots of people ask us what's behind the name of our blog. "thom haus" is based on the name of Caity's little boy Thomas and Haus being the German word for 'house' - which makes Thom's house or Thom Haus.